[anigbrowl]

Knuth is as amazing as ever.

Very surprising and disappointing that nobody at Stanford could get it together on the sound recording end to give this the clarity is deserves. It sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone in someone's pocket. I'm not talking about Knuth's old-guy voice; listen to how bad it is when he stops to take an audience question.

[actionfromafar]

Maybe everyone around are so used to seeing him they sometimes forget he's a National Treasure. :-)

[xeonmc]

So what you’re saying is, we need Nicholas Cage to abduct him to preserve the appreciation?

[petalmind]

Funny that Nicolas Cage comes up in this context. Here is a trivia snippet from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23468450/trivia/:

> During an interview, Osgood Perkins recalled a story from production where he learned Nicolas Cage has a particular skill that he says no other actor possesses: the ability to recognize how high or low he is able to speak without messing up the audio. According to Perkins: "The sound guy came over to me one day...(he) comes up to me a couple of days into Nic being on set and he's like 'Oz, I've never seen anything like it. When Nic is mic'd, I'm watching the dials, when Nic goes big, he goes right to the line. Anything more, a decibel or two over that, and it would be hard to use. Then he goes down, he goes soft and his whispering and he's barely talking, he goes right to the line. Anything past that line, you wouldn't be able to use it. He knows where the lines are. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life'."

Maybe Cage can contribute to the sound design problem actually.